When you say, "I believe..." what do you mean by "I"?

I mean myself, as a person. I know it sounds simpler than it is but it isn’t. insert your detail section here so I sound just as cool

I figure that I am my soul, the driver of my body.

I am the unique being…me. There is no other quite like me, nor will there ever be. And yet I am a part of trillions of other unique me’s who are here now, and who have come before us, and who are yet to come.
All these unique individual I’s, interconnected one to the other without even realizing that there is a connection.
Although a unique individual who bows to no man nor woman, I am but a summation of all men (and women). My totality includes that of all others, from the greatest of humans, to the dregs of society.
As an enlightened being, I recognize that I cannot yet be truly enlightened until all of us attain said enlightenment.
So to the rest of you I’s I can only say, “Please, hurry up!”

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”

By I, I mean We, and by We, we mean Legion, for we are many.

It is whatever I am. I don’t like to dwell on this question because there is no way to know for sure. I rarely say “I believe” anyway, heh.

I am what I am not

I yam who I yam and thats all that I yam. popeye

I think that I mean the consciousness that is occupying this organism. Maybe, that is an entity, like a soul, that is not from Earth, but merely on this plane of existence to see and know everything that it needs to that exists in this universe, with human senses.
What I always imagined being real is that I’ll wake up next to the ‘other part of me’, and in that place everything will make sense and it is where ‘I’ exist truly. And I’ll understand all the processes and ‘physics’ that existence is formed of, in all the states in might be able to take. But then, although it is still an individual, I get the feeling of being a part of something in that we are all one… (n’ the place on Earth that the same kind of feeling exists, of all being one, but separate, is in the most natural places, with loads of trees. =P)
Or, it could be that before we start to feel, experience and learn things, we are just a blank consciousness (But tinted with the influence of genes, I guess), that over life is moulded and given texture, and then that becomes you. Whatever systems that then can exist in, who knows…?

I’m gonna shutup now. =)

I’m with lilikoi on this. I have no idea. It is whatever it is or isn’t….

@davidbetterman I’m casting off the old, useless baggage as fast as I know how. Not an easy exercise—sadly senescence makes it dead easy to lose the stuff you’d really rather keep and much harder to cast off lifelong prejudices and flawed belief systems.

@ragingloli So we still don;t really know what “I” means, but we do know there are lots of these undefined awareness units floating around out there.

@lilikoi I believe we should allow those who don;t believe to substitute “I wonder…” or some other less religiously loaded word.

@fathippo Thanks for an interesting treatment of the question.

@ETpro I give you mega points for using ‘senescence’ past midnight

http://naturenest.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/painting.jpg

That means Bubba Earl believes.

“I” am the weird and wonderful conundrum of a composite that makes up the suite of thoughts, emotions, expectations, wants and needs that is this person.

“I” is a tricky (and very interesting) concept. We don’t yet know what could be said to constitute an “I”, but there are a lot of theories (from for example Ghost in the machine as the non-deterministic viewpoint, to Roger Penrose suggesting that “I” may be something related to quantum mechanical effects, to Douglas Hofstaders suggestion that “I” is an emergent property of complex feed-back systems). In my mind none of them are fully satisfactory. Lots of interesting research and writing is being done, and it’s been dubbed the hard problem.

Perhaps this is one of the most important problems of the 21’st century. A resolution of this question would have far ranging consequences for philosophy and science.

A bit surprised that @ninjacolin hasn’t chimed in yet, perhaps he isn’t awake yet :)

I am a grand illusion cooked up by my genes to help them perpetuate themselves. One of the great outstanding questions of science is to determine the exact mechanism that creates this illusion.

@LostInParadise I think Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene postulate has been pretty soundly debunked , See The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World by mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen.

@ETpro , There is some controversy around the selfish gene theory, but I think it is basically sound. A lot of the arguments come down to semantics. If the gene has to provide an advantage to its containing organism in order to survive, is it looking out for itself or the organism? It is still looking out for itself, but in an indirect fashion.

At the same time that this question was posed, somebody asked a question about the existence of “nothing.” There is an interesting connection between these in the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. If you will bear with me for a moment, I would like to elaborate on this and show how the philosophy leads to a scientific conjecture about “I”.

In his book Being And Nothingness Sartre says that reacting to the absence of something is different from simply not doing what we would do if it is present. For example, the act of looking for something if we lose it is different from simply getting along without it. This leads to an existential interpretation of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Sartre says we become aware of ourselves as what is left over from our sense perceptions. We sense all manner of things around us, but we sense the presence of something beyond what we perceive, which Sartre refers to as a kind of hole in being. We thus become aware of ourselves as a kind of absence without knowing what exactly it is that we are. Our existential task is thus to define ourselves.

So where is the science in this? If Sartre is right, then the ability to sense absence, essentially our ability to use the word “not”, is essential to our sense of ourselves. It is an interesting idea, but I have no idea if it is right or not. Does a dog that sulks when it owner is absent reacting to the absence of the owner? Surely dogs do not have a sense of self.

“By ‘I’ I mean ‘we’ and by ‘we’ I mean me.”

@LostInParadise Interesting. Thanks for Nothing. :-) I enjoyed the discussion of Sartre’s provocative thoughts on what constitutes and “I”..

I would note that Dawkins “Selfish Gene” idea is flawed not so much because genes have no will, no volition. I understand he is using the words figuratively. It is flawed because genes have nowhere near the total control of development we lay scientists—and even many professional scientists—want to ascribe to them. It is arguably possible for two completely different species to have exactly the same DNA, but to be very different in final form because of maternal influences and context within which they develop.

The Angler Fish is a great example. Baby angler fish larva swim about and if they encounter a grown female, they attach themselves to her body, then becoming male and remaining tiny—living parasitically off their female host. If the larva does not encounter an adult female, they develop into a female themselves. The females are thousands of times the size of the male, are hunters instead of parasites, and look nothing at all like the male. And yet both share identical DNA.

It is also possible for the DNA of an organism to mutate and that mutation have no effect on the organism. It happens routinely. It is equally possible for a mutation to creep into a species without any change in its genes.

The higher level organism is the system upon which natural selection acts. Genetic mutations can play into that action, but so can many other influences.